The Diary
by sumersprkl
Summary: CyJinx oneshot. This ended up a lot longer than I expected it to be, but whatever.


The Hive Five had fled the city, probably temporarily, but it was still the perfect time to search their tower. Cyborg agreed with this logic, in fact he had been the one to suggest it, but for some reason he still felt awkward here. The halls were creepily silent, even though all five Titans were there. There was no way the Hive could return without setting off one of Cyborg's sensors, but it somehow still felt wrong to be too loud, to touch too many things. Cyborg tried to shake off the feeling of guilt as the door to a room slid open in front of him. It was pink. _Oh, joy. The only girl's room in this entire tower and it's in my sector, figures. _Cyborg griped silently as he entered, scanning for explosives, magical traps, or even pranks. Beast Boy had been pelted with laundry as he walked into Gizmo's room, and Raven had narrowly avoided being the target of a stink bomb. It was eerie how similar this tower was to their own. There was a Game station with five well-used, completely worn out controllers; a kitchen area stocked with every form of junk food imaginable; a huge, heavily-stained couch in a large, central room. The only differences were the lack of tofu in the fridge, and the huge evidence bag in the middle of the space. Speaking of evidence, Cyborg needed to get cracking. He didn't want to be the last one finished. Cyborg quickly opened every drawer, scanned it, and shut it again, repeating the process all over the room. Suddenly he stopped. He flipped through his memory reserves. Two drawers ago, what had he seen? No… He shouldn't. He couldn't. He was a hero; he wasn't going to just steal some girl's… Yes, yes, he was. He pocketed the item. The rest of the room he scanned as fast as possible, then helped Beast Boy dig himself out from under the pile of dirty clothes. "Aw, dude," Beast Boy whimpered. "This is worse than my room." He finally resurfaced from the pile with a pair of underwear on his head. He threw them off and dry-heaved. "Living with Starfire and Raven may be irritating, but I don't think having one girl in the house is enough to cancel out that boy-odor," the changeling reflected. Cyborg rolled his human eye and pulled his friend to his feet. When he was standing, Cyborg stifled a laugh, suddenly _very _glad he could print off photos of any of his memory reserves. Apparently, the laundry in that was loaded into the trap came from the _entire _tower. "What?" Beast Boy asked, before he looked down and realized that somehow, a pink bra had attached itself to his chest area. He shrieked and tore it off. Cyborg gave in to the laughter he had been holding back. "Oh, just give me a hand with the room so we can get out of here," Beast Boy said crossly.

Later, at the Titans Tower once again, Cyborg was laughing at one of the copies of the picture he snapped of Beast Boy. He was trying to decide whether to sell it to the newspaper or simply replace every picture in every frame around the entire tower with it. "Both," he muttered. "Now there's an option." But he shook his head. If he gave it to the papers, he would have to explain how he got it, and that would mean admitting that the Titans had searched Hive Tower. He really didn't want an angry sorceress finding out that her undergarments had been desecrated by her worst enemies. So, the second option would have to be enough. He set off to make sure he was not disturbed by gently suggesting to Starfire that she take Robin to the 'mall of shopping'. He also threw all of Beast Boy's tofu out of the window in to the ocean below. Sure, the grass stain would be mad, but he'd have to go to the store to get more. That only left Raven, who wasn't going to leave her room anyway. Cyborg didn't plan on going in _there _for this little prank, so he didn't worry about her. He finished sooner than he expected, so he retired to the common room couch when he remembered the object he'd swiped from the Hive. He pulled it out of the compartment and looked at it. It was a small pink book. The words on the front read 'Algebra Notebook". But who locked an algebra notebook? As he snapped the padlock, the inside cover read "Reading this could cause death. In fact, it WILL cause death if you are not a pink-haired sorceress called Jinx. If I find that you read this and you are not Jinx, I will come after you. And I will _show… No… Mercy…" _ It went on to list the many ways that the owner would inflict torture if the book was ever read. Cyborg ignored the warning. It just served to show him that this was, as he suspected, a diary. He flipped to the first page. It started off slow, but by about the twelfth page, he was hooked. Jinx's life read like a story, a very, very, sad story. He read until a security alert informed him that Beast Boy was home with grocery bags full of tofu. Cyborg sighed and snapped the book shut. He didn't see the little red light blinking from the tiny camera imbedded into the paper.

The Hive sighed in relief as they made their way back home after a week of hiding out in one of the safe houses scattered across the city. Jinx immediately went into her room and flopped on to her bed. "Hey, who set off my laundry trap?" She heard Gizmo shout across the tower. "My stink bomb's missing too!" Billy Numerous called back. "Hey, the security cams are all shot!" Gizmo's voice called again. Jinx sat up suddenly. She ran straight for the third drawer on the left side. She let out a stream of creative curse words as she realized that her 'algebra notebook' was nowhere to be found. "Someone is going to die," she muttered, as she pulled out a secret panel in her wall. Pressing a few buttons, a monitor showed up, displaying nothing but black. Jinx cursed again. She tried rewinding the footage… and… There! She paused the tape just as Cyborg's face came in to view. She let out another string of carefully chosen words. Leaving some of the worst words out, what she said boiled down to something like "God, it had to be him. It HAD to be HIM. Of course it did."

About half a day had passed, and everyone had already noticed the pictures. Robin just laughed, and hadn't punished anyone. Beast Boy had repeatedly tried to take them all down, but each time he missed a couple he hadn't noticed. Cyborg was pretty sure he saw Raven swipe one off of the wall in the hallway and take it to her room. He had a moment to relax, so he opened his new favorite book: the autobiography of Jinx, written in the form of diary entries. He was about in the middle when he came upon the date that he had gone undercover at Hive Academy. _Oh, god… She really liked me, didn't she?_ Cyborg thought sadly. The last day he was at the school for villains, the entry was extra-long. There were some stains on the paper that were either tears or blood. With Jinx, you could never really know. Cyborg sighed uncomfortably as he realized how much he'd hurt her. He wished he could somehow apologize, but that would never happen if they were still mortal enemies. Instead, he just continued reading.

In the other tower, Jinx paced around the room. "Relax," Gizmo said. "We'll get them back eventually." Jinx glared at him. "No, you don't understand. They have… something of mine. And I want it back," she seethed. "How do we get into their tower, though?" One of her teammates asked. Jinx was so angry she didn't care who. "We don't," she answered. "We lure them away from their tower and fight them in their city." Gizmo scratched his head. "Uh, I don't really want to be the one to admit this, but… We've never won against the Titans. How do we do it now?" Jinx whirled around and poked him in the stomach. "We _prepare. _Whenever we've lost before, we were overconfident. We need to train. We need new tech. We need a new strategy," she told him, poking him in the stomach with each declaration. He backed up into the wall with a frightened expression on his face. Everyone knew to listen to Jinx when she got like this. The last time someone had defied her wishes in this state, they had never been heard from again. The Hive had rewarded her by promoting her into the next class. "Pair up, we're practicing fighting techniques." When no one moved she glared. "NOW!" The boys jumped up and rushed to comply with her wishes. "That's much better," she purred.

Cyborg had finished reading the diary, cover to cover, but he was still flipping through to every part where Jinx mentioned feeling forced into villainy. Her backstory seemed remarkably similar to Raven's, except that while the half-demon did all she could to counteract the darkness in her soul, Jinx had just given in. In fact, from what he'd read, Jinx didn't even want to be a villain. She only stayed because she was talented, and because she feared that she'd be forced into hiding if she ever stopped. Cyborg was forced to stop reading when an alarm blasted through the building. He snapped the book shut and placed it into the storage compartment in his chest. Running to the common room, he found Robin already at the computer. "The Hive is robbing a bank in the city," the leader said. "A bank? Seems a bit uncreative for the Hive," Raven remarked. "Yeah, why do they even need money? They don't even buy anything. They just steal whatever they need," Beast Boy continued for her. "Well, whatever the reason, we have to stop them," Robin said. "Titans go!"

"A bank? Really? You couldn't think of anything more creative than this?!" Jinx glared at Gizmo from over the stolen money bags. "We don't even pay for things! Why on Earth would we need money?!" She screeched. "The Titans probably think this is a joke! They probably think they've been prank-called or something! They probably aren't even going to show up!" Gizmo actually sighed in relief when he saw the Teen Titans appearing over the horizon. It meant he could interrupt the rant of his pink-haired teammate. "Look, here they come!" He said, pointing. "You got lucky," Jinx hissed, before getting into fighting stance. "I beg to differ," Gizmo muttered, getting into position next to her. She growled but let it go, the Titans were too close for her to attack her own teammate, and she needed him for the battle. She was forced to simply mentally catalogue him for revenge at a later time. The battle began. Jinx threw blast after blast at Cyborg, who just dodged and shot his sonic cannon at Gizmo. He flew backwards into a building, unconscious. Jinx, frustrated, turned towards where Raven had tied Billy Numerous up and blasted her. When Beast Boy rushed to her side, she blasted him as well. Robin threw a birdarang at Mammoth, knocking him unconscious, but the oversized mutant fell on top of him. Starfire blasted See-More and See-More blasted her back, resulting in them both being thrown back and knocking them unconscious. Cyborg was still simply dodging everything Jinx threw his way. "Why aren't you fighting back?!" She yelled. Cyborg didn't say anything, just dodged another blast. "Why are you doing this?!" Jinx shrieked. Cyborg simply opened the compartment, grabbed the little pink book, and tossed it across to the sorceress. She immediately dove to catch it. "Why are you?" He asked. Jinx stared at him until she heard sirens in the background. Cyborg collected his unconscious friends and loaded them into the T-Car as Jinx ran. Cyborg let her go.

The Titans slowly came to in the infirmary at the Tower. "What happened?" Robin asked, looking around at Raven wrapped in a blanket sipping herbal tea, Starfire sitting up with an ice pack on her head, and Beast Boy still lying on a hospital gurney next to him. "You all got knocked out," Cyborg said. "The police came and dealt with the rest." Robin sat up. "Did the Hive get away?!" Robin asked desperately. "Only one of 'em," Cyborg responded. "And I don't know if we're gonna hear from her anytime soon."

Across the city in a safe house, Jinx sat on a concrete floor, alone. She was sobbing and holding a little pink book to her chest. The cover read 'algebra notebook', but the inside held every secret that she had ever had… Except the one that was far too dangerous to put on paper. "Cyborg…" She murmured. As she spoke the name, she dissolved into tears once more. She didn't notice the little red light flashing from the camera embedded into the paper, let alone know that the signal had been redirected to transmit directly to the Titan's Tower. "Jinx…" Cyborg sighed, as he watched on a monitor in his robotic eye. They both spoke the next words at the same time. "Why do I have to love you?"


End file.
